In today's General Packet Radio Systems (GPRS) a packet control unit (PCU) manages, allocates, and schedules the use of packet data resources necessary to establish uplink packet data connections between mobile units and the infrastructure. To reduce the cost of deploying these systems, PCUs are remotely located from the basestation transceiver systems (BTSs) that maintain the wireless links between the mobile units and the infrastructure. When a mobile unit requests an uplink data connection the BTS maintaining the wireless link with the mobile must communicate with the remote PCU to setup the requested link. Thus, the link setup is delayed by the messaging between the BTS and the PCU. Because of uplink messaging required by the internet protocol (IP), this BTS-PCU delay may be experienced multiple times while a web page is downloaded to the mobile. Therefore, to speed overall data transfer a need exists for a communication infrastructure and method to speed uplink data setup.